F.P. Grove was a German a writer who committed "suicide" and became, by this act, an anonymous person, an underground man. We say he was an immigrant, though he would have seen himself as an exile -- a moral, psychological condition. Germany, being German, and being a writer in German would have been the reference terms for him in the situation of exile, the positive poles of reflective concern in a place -- North America -- that had no reality for him, that was a negative entity, nowhere. As we can see in his letters to Warkentin, Germany held Grove, attached him to its existence. By leaving it, he left history; by leaving history, he left his individuality. The compact between history and society in Europe placed the identity of the individual into a concrete, metaphysically unproblematic world. What Grove's arrival in North America did was to destroy this compact.
